March 23, 2017

When a Miami psychologist examined Naika Venant in June 2015, she found a “depressed, angry and fearful young girl” who thought often about death and dying. “She expects people to abandon and betray her,” the psychologist wrote.

Terilee Wunderman diagnosed Naika with “significant depression,” and post-traumatic stress disorder, and recommended that she see a specially trained therapist to mend her broken psyche. Wunderman also warned against filling the 12-year-old with pills, because the medication she was taking “sometimes can cause the side-effect of depression.”

During the next 18 months, however, Naika’s doctors reached for the prescription pad again and again, increasing the dose of an ADHD medication, and adding another drug, Zoloft, records indicate. The anti-depressant comes with a critical warning: an increased risk of suicide in children. Story here.

Photo: Naika Venant and and her mother, Gina Alexis, smile in a photo posted on Facebook. Facebooky

February 01, 2017

A Miami child welfare judge threatened to hold child welfare workers in contempt of court for failing to appear before her Tuesday morning to help explain “what went wrong” before a 14-year-old hanged herself while live-streaming the tragedy on Facebook.

She also agreed, in response to a Miami Herald court petition, to review thousands of pages of documents related to the girl’s care to determine which of them the public has a right to see.

Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Maria Sampedro-Iglesia had scheduled a hearing for Tuesday morning to examine the suicide last week of Naika Venant, a troubled teenager who had been in and out of foster care since 2009.

Sometime after midnight on Jan. 22, Naika tied a scarf around her neck and hanged herself from a shower door. The teen streamed her death on Facebook Live from a bathroom of her Miami Gardens foster home. About two hours into the video, she was seen dangling from the shower.

March 01, 2016

For the second year in a row, the Florida Legislature is poised to finish a session without awarding any of the legal damages owed to the surviving victim of one of the most horrific child abuse cases in state history.

Victor Barahona, the surviving twin brother of Nubia Barahona, was found near death and covered with pesticides alongside his sister’s decomposing body on Interstate 95 in Palm Beach County in 2011. They were 10 years old.

The twins had been sexually abused, starved and forced to sleep in a bathtub for years by the foster parents who adopted them, Jorge and Carmen Barahona. They were ordered to eat cockroaches and consume food that contained feces and, despite numerous complaints to the child abuse hotline and warnings from teachers, the state failed to stop their parents from routinely beating and binding them inside their West Miami-Dade home.

A report commissioned by David Wilkins, then secretary of the Department of Children and Families, found that the agency’s "failure in common sense, critical thinking, ownership, follow-through, and timely and accurate information-sharing" defined the care of Nubia and Victor.

In 2013, the agency conceded it was at fault and agreed to pay Victor $5 million to settle a lawsuit filed on Victor’s behalf. The department said it would pay $1.25 million to Victor immediately, money from a risk-management fund used to cover liability. But the agency can't pay the rest without legislative approval of a "claim bill."

Under state sovereign immunity laws, the state is shielded from having to pay more than $200,000 when it injures someone, unless the Legislature agrees to lift the cap and authorize the payment. But because of a decision by Senate leadership, the Legislature won’t pay the Barahona bill and, potentially, a host of other claim bills even though the state is at fault.

“Despite some of the failures that are so prominently documented in the news, the department has many successes too,” Carroll said. “We deal with many families where we change literally the trajectory of a child’s life, we change the trajectory of a family’s life moving forward.”

The Senate committee on Children, Families and Elder Affairs voted unanimously for Carroll. Members supported him last year as well, but his was one of many gubernatorial appointments that were not confirmed by the Senate. If Carroll is not confirmed this year, the governor will have to appoint someone else to the job.

October 27, 2015

Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday requested $22.9 million in the state budget for case managers for children in the custody of the Department of Children and Families and provide other safety services for abused and neglected kids.

The money is expected to hire 272 case managers, reducing the number of children each manager is responsible for.

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking when a child is a victim of abuse or neglect," Scott said in a statement. "Anytime something horrific happens to an innocent child, we have to stop and think about what we can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again."

Hiring people alone may not be enough to keep staffing levels high and kids safe. Earlier this month, Janice Thomas, deputy secretary of DCF, told a Florida House subcommittee that the agency faces high job turnover: For every three new hires, one staffer leaves.

“It is a high-pressure stress situation,” said Thomas, a former investigator.

October 22, 2015

Keishanna Thomas’s name — and those of her five children — appeared again and again in reports to the state’s child abuse hotline. The calls began more than a decade ago. There were an even dozen.

In June 2014, just as state lawmakers were passing the most far-reaching reform of Florida’s child protection system, Thomas decided she had had enough of caseworkers coming to her home and scrutinizing her children. “Ms. Thomas became uncooperative” a report said.

The Department of Children & Families could have asked a judge to force Thomas, now 32, to let workers into her home, to accept their oversight. But agency lawyers instead insisted the state walk away.

It was a tragic mistake.

When the next report — No. 13 — was phoned to the hotline earlier this month, an investigator made a startling discovery: Thomas now had only four children. Eleven-year-old Janiya was nowhere to be found, and her mother had nothing to say about her whereabouts. What is believed to be Janiya’s body was found Sunday night inside a locked freezer in a relative’s garage. “The freezer was brought to the relative’s home by the mother . . . under the guise that she was being evicted,” a DCF report said.

DCF Secretary Mike Carroll declined to discuss the case Wednesday with the Miami Herald. In a short statement, the agency’s press secretary, Michelle Glady, said Carroll has dispatched a “Critical Incident Rapid Response Team” to Bradenton to look into the agency’s long history with the Thomas family, and to investigate the actions leading to Janiya’s death.

“This series is powerful,” Bingham Judge Deborah Nelson said in a release. “Powerful statistics, powerful examples, powerful writing. And that’s what it takes to move government to protect its most vulnerable citizens — and move they did with significant changes in law and policy.”

The $20,000 Bingham Prize will be presented to the Miami Herald on May 7 at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The series, which was published in March 2014, resulted in sweeping changes in child-welfare laws across the state. In addition to the stories that ran in the newspaper, The Herald built a searchable database detailing the children’s stories.

The series has already won several major awards: The Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in March; The University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism's Selden Ring Award in February; the McClatchy President's Award for Public Service in February and the Knight Award for Public Service in September.

March 26, 2015

The purple bruises on either side of Ahizya Osceola’s jaw were telltale signs: Someone, a child abuse expert said, had grabbed the 3-year-old’s face forcefully enough to leave fingerprints.

But Ahizya’s bruised jaw was only a small part of what the boy faced. The state’s abuse hotline received a report on April 21, 2014, that he had scratches on both sides of his neck, and a “large bruise and bump” on his forehead. Two weeks earlier, teachers saw a “pinch mark” on one ear, a bruise behind the other and two bruises on his face.

Two weeks before that, Ahizya had a busted lip, another scratch on his face, a bruise on his shoulder blade and pinches and bruises on his ears. Ahizya told his preschool teacher that “daddy” hit him with a belt. His father, Nelson Osceola, instead described an active and clumsy toddler who frequently injured himself in run-ins with furniture, walls, a toilet and other children during an Easter party.

Broward County child protection investigators discounted the possibility of abuse and left him with a father who had a lengthy rap sheet — including aggravated assault charges — and a history of alleged drug use. The Broward Sheriff’s Office had one last chance to intervene in December, when the state’s abuse hotline was told that Ahizya’s stepmother had beaten his bottom, and he had bruises and abrasions on his face. But that call, too, went unheeded.

On Wednesday, Nelson Osceola and the stepmother, Analiz Osceola, were arrested by Hollywood police in connection with Ahizya’s death the previous week. He was found last Friday concealed by garbage bags in the family’s laundry room. Analiz Osceola faces the bulk of the charges: aggravated manslaughter, child neglect and giving false information to police conducting an investigation. Nelson Osceola is charged with one count of child neglect.

March 03, 2015

Miami Herald reporters Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch won the 2015 prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for their series, Innocents Lost, a year-long project that chronicled how nearly 500 children died of abuse or neglect over six years in families who had a history with the Florida Department of Children & Families, the state agency designed to protect children.

The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School announced Tuesday night it had awarded the $25,000 prize to Marbin Miller and Burch. Also recognized: reporter Mary Ellen Klas, designers Lazaro Gamio and Kara Dapena, videographer and photographer Emily Michot and investigations editor Casey Frank.

The series led to sweeping changes in child-welfare laws across the state. The project included a searchable database detailing the children’s stories.